International SEO questions

I'm putting together a proposal for an international SEO campaign. While I have lots of experience in SEO, I have never run a multi-lingual SEO campaign. I have a fair idea about how to go about it but I would like to ask a few questions:

Is it best having a different site for each country or is it best having 1 site with different languages? What are the pros and cons?
Are there any multi-lingual press release distribution companies or do I need to search for individual ones for each country - looking for Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Indian and English?
Percentage wise, how much more do people charge for a multi-lingual campaign?

Thanks in advance for people's help. I appreciate that there are a lot of questions there.

Advantages of having different sites:
*If one website got affected in any updates, the other sites may survive on other countries search engines
Disadvantage:
*You have to put more effects on each sites.

Advantages of having one site:
*Once the domain gained authority, then it's easier to rank the other language pages.
Disadvantage:
*If your domain got hit, then there's chance for ranking drops on sub pages.

I am a fan of having different sites for different languages. If you go to the Austrian google, you see that almost all the sites that rank well have .at domain names, and the same goes for other googles as well. Better to have an appropriate domain for each language, with content just in that language, and backlinks from the same TLD. But, as the poster above said, it's not worth the effort if you aren't very serious about marketing to one particular audience. For example, if my product required a lot of customer service or sales calls, I wouldn't bother doing this in Portuguese if I don't speak Portuguese (and didn't want to hire somebody who does) since I wouldn't be able to follow through with the clients. All depends on the business.

Advantages of having different sites:
*If one website got affected in any updates, the other sites may survive on other countries search engines
Disadvantage:
*You have to put more effects on each sites.

Advantages of having one site:
*Once the domain gained authority, then it's easier to rank the other language pages.
Disadvantage:
*If your domain got hit, then there's chance for ranking drops on sub pages.

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I appreciate that you're spreading the risk with different sites but given I take the a similar approach for all of my sites, it is likely that I would be hit with the same problem for them all if I got a penalty. Plus the anchor text diversity would be pretty good! I think the main question is domain authority verses TLDs. How much difference would TLDs make to the rankings or would .com be alright for all of them?

I am a fan of having different sites for different languages. If you go to the Austrian google, you see that almost all the sites that rank well have .at domain names, and the same goes for other googles as well. Better to have an appropriate domain for each language, with content just in that language, and backlinks from the same TLD. But, as the poster above said, it's not worth the effort if you aren't very serious about marketing to one particular audience. For example, if my product required a lot of customer service or sales calls, I wouldn't bother doing this in Portuguese if I don't speak Portuguese (and didn't want to hire somebody who does) since I wouldn't be able to follow through with the clients. All depends on the business.

Click to expand...

Well i would be wanting to rank well for all the languages that I was targeting. Do you think TLDs and more important than domain authority?

Well i would be wanting to rank well for all the languages that I was targeting. Do you think TLDs and more important than domain authority?

Click to expand...

Edit: I originally said I think domain authority is more important, but I think the better answer is that if you only truly have the time/budget to promote one site, then go at it with your full force. You're only going to create a bunch of half-assed mediocre sites if you spread yourself too thin. If you can outsource most of it and money isn't much of an issue, build separate sites. Long term results are greater from that, in my opinion.

Look into the hreflang tags, they can be your friends here, can be used on same domain or cross domain. Ideal setup is with each location pages sitting on a server in that location. Can be as tlds or subdomains. Probably better than subdirectories, but there are lots of nuances.

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